Brain box: Multitasking chips that can match the human mind

SOMETHING is going on outside your window. Rough oblongs zoom past, one of which sidles along and stops, disgorging a series of small irregular shapes in many colours. High-pitched sounds drift up as they messily assemble into a row behind a taller shape.

Microseconds pass and all becomes clear: a group of schoolchildren has pulled up in a bus and lined up behind their teacher. Your brain has taken a chaos of sensory inputs and produced a lucid experience – as it does day in, day out, throughout your life.

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If only computers could do the same. We may talk about artificial intelligence learning human smarts like driving cars or playing poker, but when it comes to quickly making sense of a huge, disordered set of information, we can’t build an AI that even comes close to our brains. That’s partly down to mysteries about the workings of the human mind that we’re hard-pressed to explain. But it’s also down to a bottleneck baked into the architecture of nearly every computer for more than half a century.

Now we may be on the cusp of eliminating it thanks to a radical new computing paradigm, one that uses hardware that simultaneously stores and processes information – not unlike networks of neurons in the brain. Fulfil its promise and we could create machine minds that can parse rich streams of data in real time, spot patterns that elude us, and maybe learn without any help from humans. …